caffeine-induced insomnia.
the love of God in us is a love that gives without expecting returns.
the perils of being too comfortable as a single, solitary unit independent of the external world and its influences.
and yet, its perks entice.
Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God.
Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.
Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.
There is no fear in love.
But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment.
The one who fears is not made perfect in love.
- 1 John 4: 7-8 and 18 -
judging by the rules, i should be careful as well.
How, why, when he recognized no one else with any consistency, did Clive recognize Deborah? There are clearly many sorts of memory, and emotional memory is one of the deepest and least understood.
Neal J. Cohen has written about the famous experiment of Edouard Claparede, a Swiss physician, in 1911:
"Upon shaking hands with a patient with Korsakoff syndrome (the condition which caused my patient Jimmie's severe amnesia), Claparede pricked her finger with a pin hidden in his hand. Subsequently, whenever he again attempted to shake the patient's hand, she promptly withdrew it. When he questioned her about this behavior, she replied, "Isn't it allowed to withdraw one's hand?" and "Perhaps there is a pin hidden in your hand," and finally, "Sometimes pins are hidden in hands." Thus the patient learned the appropriate response based on previous experience, but she never seemed to attribute her behavior to the personal memory of some previously experienced event."
- Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Oliver Sacks -
how excruciating, an inner implosion.
an escape so desperately pursued, but Sentiment and Guilt weigh me down like chains of steel.
i mutter "finished", i will disengagement.
but they scorn from a distance, leaving me heavy and distracted.
concentrate, i cannot.
for somewhere inside me, the command was issued and executed: its scattering minions ensuring that i am at an utmost low.
i'm careless, i believe
this brings tears to my eyes.
perfection at 5:08 PM
becoming a lawless fiend.
academics are truly a different breed.
not everyone has the stomach for them, sadly.
a tall, sturdy tree stands in the heart of the forest.
sun rays can scorch it, bullets of rain can beat down on it.
yet it remains rooted and thrives.
then the loggers come in.
and with every blow of the axe, over multiple points in time.
even the sturdiest tree loses its conviction.
there is only so much it can withstand for so long.
Jenny Saffran and Gregory Griepentrog at the University of Wisconsin compared eight-month-old infants to adults with and without musical training in a learning test of tone sequences. The infants, they found, relied much more heavily on absolute pitch cues; the adults, on relative pitch cues. This suggested to them that absolute pitch may be universal and highly adaptive in infancy but becomes maladaptive later and is therefore lost. "Infants limited to grouping melodies by perfect pitches," they pointed out, "would never discover that the songs they hear are the same when sung in different keys or that words spoken at different fundamental frequencies are the same." In particular, they argued, the development of language necessitates the inhibition of absolute pitch, and only unusual conditions enable it to be retained. (The acquisition of a tonal language may be one of the "unusual conditions" that lead to the retention and perhaps heightening of absolute pitch.)
- Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Oliver Sacks -
regrets and mistakes, they're memories made
who would have known how bittersweet this would taste.
perfection at 3:39 PM
